Cortney Connolly

Founder and Curator of LUmkA

New York, NY & London, UK based

MRES, Central Saint Martins, University of London (2027)

BFA, Tisch School of Arts, New York University (2022)

Cortney Connolly is a curator and writer, currently pursuing an MRES in Exhibition Studies at Central Saint Martins and acquired a BFA from Tisch School of Arts, New York University in 2022. Having gained experience in blue-chip galleries, experimental spaces, and institutions, Connolly is inspired to test the boundaries of traditional curation and theoretical discourse. With this desire to expand the limits of exhibition-making, artist-institution collaboration, and collective-driven problem-solving, Connolly’s curatorial and written practices fuse art and aesthetics with economics, philosophy, science, and sociology to inform cultural analysis. During her undergrad at NYU, Connolly as Founding Editor-in-Chief of FreeSwim: An Academic Journal, published and organized the first edition and an in-person exhibition titled FreeSwim: The Postmodern Grotesque. Through interviews, essays, and art, the publication and exhibition showcased eleven artists, emerging to established, to explore how the body, art, and social hierarchy are interconnected through the performance of disgust. In 2024, Connolly founded On The Rag, a bi-annual publication merging humor with contemporary art discourse to satirize the blue-chip art market. Notable exhibitions and texts include The Theatre, Cult of Domesticity, and THE BOYS CLUB (Redacted), an exhibition bringing together femme and queer artists from various generations and disciplines. Aiming to subvert Pop Art as a methodology, interrogate power systems bolstered by mass communication, and reclaim identity, the exhibition included works by artists Marilyn Minter, Erica Rutherford, and Susan Weil, among others.

Connolly’s work has been reviewed by Artforum, Cultured Magazine, Elephant Art Magazine, Impulse Magazine, and Office Magazine, among others.

Photo: K14n4